This may be longer longest day than folks...

This may be longer longest day than folks expected.

Anyone else experiencing high rates of linux server crashes today?

Just today, Sat June 30th - starting soon after the start of the day GMT. We've had a handful of blades in different datacentres as managed by different teams all go dark - not responding to pings, sc...

More on work

Making the rounds of hot topics this week is an article in the Atlantic by Anne-Marie Slaughter. Why Women Still Can’t Have It All tells the story of a woman who gives up her position as a aide to Secretary of State Clinton to, without euphemism, spend more time with her family.

Slaughter has worked in the rarefied levels of government with lots of hours and lots of travel. She decided that working like this wasn't working for her. It's easy to be skeptical of someone who truly has so many options available. After the first few paragraphs, I was ready to argue that point, but she brought in a number of threads that I thought were good.

Because we expect to live longer than previous generations, it's help to rethink the arc of our careers. We can plan, to the extent that we can plan, to peak later, perhaps in our 50s, rather than in our 40s. We can plan to have multiple, smaller career arcs. In short, we no longer have to calibrate our career against the end marker of at 65. (There are obvious exceptions for work that demands a lot of our bodies.)

This notion also leads to the idea that pushing the Social Security retirement age past 70 for most professions makes actuarial sense. We'll leave that for another day.

Dan Kennedy, in last night's Beat The Press, remarked that The Atlantic has a long, proud tradition of running 12,000 words when 3,000 words would have done just fine. Slaughter's article is much too long and so the most useful point, IMO, shows up somewhere beyond word 8,000. The discussion on BTP is also worth a listen.

And the bad ideas just keep comin'

And the bad ideas just keep comin'

So, we've got a superintendent in Huntsville, AL now sending kids off to the wilderness to live in teepees (with no ability to appeal) if they fight in school. We've got Philadelphia considering not o...

In the last class of my WISE course on...

In the last class of  my WISE course on the future of the news business, I made a few predictions. One of them was that, within a year, CNN would be toast. 
The only question now is whether it will be golden brown or burnt before the little bell dings.
+Dan Kennedy 

Media Nation » Will heads roll after CNN meltdown? Should they?

Three quick items on the Supreme Court's decision to (mostly) uphold the Affordable Care Act: 1. I was watching CNN while waiting for the ruling in the mistaken belief that the other cable nets would ...

Guide to Cheap Worcester

Guide to Cheap Worcester

I’d been thinking about putting together a guide to being cheap in our fair city for some time, especially for the items that don’t fit neatly into the Wednesday format. So I’ve...

Of storms and poetry

After yesterday's thunderstorms, the skies have cleared and a strong, fresh northwest wind is bringing cool air. I just got the fire started and soon it'll be warm for our breakfast.

Rocco doesn't like thunderstorms. He finds a place in the house, oddly, it seems, by a sink, such as the kitchen or bathroom, and stays there for the duration. No enticing of any sort, even cookies or supper, will get him to move until the storm has passed.

I recently talked about this with another dog owner. He mentioned how his new young dog went through obedience school and was trained to stay calm in noisy situations. Thunderstorms, though, are different, with the  low-frequency rumbles that can be felt long before we can even hear them. This friend said he'd put his dog in the dog's crate and, to add to the calm, would read Robert Frost's poetry to the dog. It seemed to work. When storms came, the dog now goes to his crate and waits for the poetry reading. If a storm comes at night, the dog will its master, expecting to hear Birches.

We tried this with Rocco. Of course, he's much older and his fears are deep. He didn't budge while Sandra read The Road Not Taken.

The storms, as I'd mentioned, have moved on. Rocco's already asked me once if it's time for breakfast. Not yet, but soon.

You might or might not want to learn how...

You might or might not want to learn how to change your Safari user agent: http://is.gd/ZxLOcw

On Orbitz, Mac Users Steered to Pricier Hotels - WSJ.com

Orbitz has found that people who use Apple's Mac computers spend as much as 30% more a night on hotels, so the online travel agency is starting to show them different, and sometimes costlier, travel o...

so much for 24x7x365 news. The Helsingin...

so much for 24x7x365 news. The Helsingin Sanomat is taking the next five weeks off because there's no news planned for summer in Finland. (Link should go to English page.)

Helsingin Sanomat - International Edition

Helsingin Sanomien Verkkoliite. Tuoreimmat uutiset aamusta iltaan sekä Helsingin Sanomat -verkkoliitteessä kaikki paperilehden kirjoitukset, kuvat ja grafiikat. Sähköisessä arkistossa yli miljoona kir...

Hint: It's not about the sunlight, except...

Hint: It's not about the sunlight, except that it is, but not in the way that you might think.

Essays on the U.S. Color Line » Blog Archive » Why Are Europeans White? (E1)

Most people know that it has something to do with sunlight, UV, latitude, and vitamin D. Here is a map of solar UV at the surface taken from satellite. It matches the skin-tone map everywhere but Euro...